It’s been just over a week (9 days to be exact) that I started playing Ingress, and I became level 5 yesterday. It’s not as fast as some people level up (level 6 can be done in a couple of days or so), but I mostly play alone and did the first days only on foot. Now I use the car more.

My receiver broke down. Well, not all of it. Everything worked, except sound. Pretty basic for a receiver if you ask me. I inquired what a repair would cost, but all I was quoted were the costs of taking the device in for investigation. I decided to give it some rest, and asked my friends for advice. Their most sane conclusion was just to do the repair, since replacing the receiver would be way more costly.

This evening I started watching a tv series, and switched from sound via the receiver to stereo sound via the tv. It’s an flatpanel tv, so I guess you know what difference that made. Yuck. But…better than no sound at all.

During watching, I started to notice an echo. Because I was too busy watching, too pulled in to what I was watching, I didn’t pay much attention to it. After I watched my series, I switched to digital radio, and -as a creature of habit- I turned up the volume by using the Logitech remote, not the remote from the tv. The volume did increase. It took a second for me to realize that…..I just turned up the volume of the receiver. The echo I had been hearing was coming from …. my receiver.

As by magic, it now works again. All channels have sound, all inputs work, all I now have to do is put the right “label” into each source again since I did a factory reset to make sure the receiver wasn’t stuck in some software loop or something.

So……until some scientific rational reason comes up, I am going to believe that it was magic that made my receiver work again. Isn’t that something?

In October my NAS disk broke down after the powerfailure. So I bought new disks. Last month (not even a week ago) my Windows system disk (SSD) died (unrecoverable). So I bought a new disk. Today my receiver gave in. No more sound. Everything works, except there is no sound. Factory reset (my receiver has that) didn’t work. So I’m guessing the pre-amp inside died, since it has 7 discrete amplifiers for each channel, so the problem must lie before it reaches these amplifiers.